In a seminal article recently released, the H1 was: “Why 1% of search market share is worth over $1 Billion”. Further actuarial information followed which is of great importance for SEO. The big numbers always tend to to lose me, but commentary to the article by Jakob Nielsen, made things hit home, he analysed:

The value per page view on a content site tends to be about 0.1 cents. Thus, pointing people to content is more than 100 times as profitable as actually writing that content.

In days of halycon yore (1999), some sage said in a Business 2.0 article something along the lines of:

the people who made money during the Yukon Gold Rush in the 19th century and who are still represented today were not the diggers or panners of gold, but the people who sold them the shovels, revolvers, coaches, clothing

So a single search in the US is worth 12 cents. In retrospect, did Dewey (of library cataloging fame) ever make 12 cents from his indexing system?